Two weeks ago, The Jerusalem Post published a lengthy story about a recently discovered manuscript by Tuvia Bielski, the leader of the Polish Jewish brigade that rescued 1,200 Jews from the Holocaust, the largest such rescue in history.

To the public, it was a revelation. But it was not to Jonathan Brent, the director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, which holds the manuscript.

Though it only got a brief mention in today's New York Times, the attacks on a soon-to-be-published novel about Anne Frank have received considerable more play in England. The Sunday Times of London broke--or rather, made--the news when it got Gillian Walnes, a member of the Anne Frank Trust, to publicly criticize Sharon Dogar's upcoming Anne Frank-inspired novel. Walnes took issue with a section in the book, to be titled "Annexed," where Peter van Pels, a boy in the attic who Anne lived with, expresses romantic feelings for Anne. "I don't understand why this story has to be sexualised," Walnes told London's Sunday Times.

It looks like this latest kerfuffle will take its place in the long list of woes surrounding Anne Frank's legacy. It's worth remembering that Frank's diary, published by her father Otto, in 1947, two years after his 15-year-old daughter died in Bergen-Belsen, has always attracted controversy. In last year's "Anne Frank: The Book, The Life and the Afterlife," Francine Prose showed how even Otto tried to sanitize Anne's writing, cutting out the parts where Anne belittled her mother or talked about her period.

The Jewish Week garnered two first place awards and one second-place honor in the annual Simon Rockower Journalism contest sponsored by the American Jewish Press Association.

Editor and Publisher Gary Rosenblatt won top honors for his Between the Lines column, capturing the Louis Rapoport Award for Excellence in Commentary. The three columns dealt with the day school crisis, saying Kaddish and the controversy surrounding New York Times’ columnist Roger Cohen’s writing on Iran.

Posthumous books are all the rage these days, but here's one that's bound to make waves soon. An unpublished memoir by Tuvia Bielski, the leader of the Bieslki partisans, which saved 1,200 Jews in the Polish woods during the Holocaust, and was the subject of last year's film Defiance, has just been found. According to a story published in The Jerusa

A relationship built on the notion that Israel is a critical U.S. strategic asset may be weakening as more and more analysts in both countries argue that the Jewish state is becoming more of a foreign policy liability.

So far that view has not penetrated Israel’s overwhelming support in Congress, and all but the most partisan Jewish leaders say it hasn’t affected Obama administration policy. On the contrary, there was evidence strategic cooperation was deepening even before President Barack Obama’s recent Jewish charm offensive.

In post-Madoff New York, two new productions of ‘Merchant of Venice’ (one starring Al Pacino) are on the boards this month.

06/07/2010 - 20:00

Ted Merwin

Special To The Jewish Week

If any theatrical character continues to haunt and fascinate us centuries after his debut upon the stage, it is Shylock, the frightening, agonized Jewish moneylender who demands to be repaid only with a pound of flesh. While Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice” has always ranked among the most popular of the Bard’s plays in this country, Shylocks are popping up all over the city these days.

Last weekend’s New York Times report on a secret memo by Defense Secretary Robert Gates warning that the Obama administration needs a better long-term strategy for dealing with the Iranian nuclear threat reflects some disturbing realities.

Sixty-five years after the Holocaust, and Yom Hashoah -- April 11 -- remains, appropriately, a day that the Jewish community can't figure out how to observe. And rightly so. Most holy days are actually on the day something unique happened, unlike Yom Hashoah, whose Nissan 27 date was a Knesset compromise rather than a holy anniversary.